Customized electronic mail (“email”) content is not a new idea. Many email marketing systems use this model. However, they all work generally under the same principal. The content of an email is determined at send time through the use of tokenization. A very common example is to place the recipients name in the body of the email just before sending it. There are more complex versions of this, but they all have one thing in common. They all set the email content at the time the email is sent, and the content of the message cannot change after it has been sent.
The ability to place truly dynamic, real-time content in an email (that is, content that is updated at the time the email is opened) has long been a goal of email senders, but it has always presented severe challenges to anyone trying to achieve it. The possible techniques available to achieve the goal, like those used on web pages, such as JavaScript, iFrames, and SWF Objects, are specifically blocked by almost all email clients.
Accordingly, there is a need for tools and techniques that provide the ability to generate and transmit email messages that contain content that is fresh (and/or can be refreshed) when the message is read by the recipient, not just when the message has been sent.